January 9 2005

Damien
Katz posted a follow-up to
his comprehensive
blog about the effort to rewrite
the formula engine in Lotus Notes. In the follow-up, he's mostly
addressed comments left on his site, but some of the
thoughts expressed here have
been covered as well. Good to see Damien sticking with it and taking
trolls, admirers, and Ray Ozzie all in stride.
Anyway, in the comments on the follow-up thread, we get one of the (as
always) anonymous trolls complaining about how Lotus Notes sucks. This
particular complaint says

if I accidentally cut and paste
anything from Internet Explorer directly into a Notes 6.x email, it freezes
up for (and I am not exaggerating here) nearly 60 seconds.

Ergo,
Notes sucks.

I cut and paste from the browser to Notes all the time. Now, I'm
using Firefox exclusively (well, almost exclusively) these days, and I
just tested this -- absolutely no delay in pasting from Firefox into Notes.
I loaded up IE and did the same thing with IE, and got about a one
second delay. Other times, the paste from IE takes no time at all.

At any rate, the point is, Notes gets blamed for everything. Network
crash or congestion? "Notes is slow". Machine locks
up? "Notes crashed". VPN or public wifi network configuration
challenges? "I can't use Notes when I try to work at Starbucks".

This isn't uniquely a Notes problem. When I was in IT all those years
ago, we'd routinely get helpdesk calls blaming the world's ills on cc:Mail.
Most of the time, cc:Mail wasn't the problem -- it was too (said
with fond affection) brain-dead to have all the problems users ascribed
to it.